This is all getting more than a little embarrassing

All these antics between two leading government functionaries who are still embroiled in the Panama Papers scandal and the European parliamentary committee tasked with investigating the implications of the Panama Papers and others matters related to money laundering and tax evasion, are more than a little embarrassing for the nation.

From a Maltese perspective, this is the scandal that just won’t go away. And yesterday, the country was treated to the latest instalment: a sarcasm-laced letter from the PANA Committee’s chairman to the Prime Minister asking the latter to ‘use his authority’ and order his elusive chief of staff to appear before the Committee once and for all next May.

The chair opened his letter with the line ‘As you probably know’ he said, the European Parliament has set up a committee following the Panama Papers revelations. The use of the word ‘probably’ speaks volumes to a Prime Minister who has all but ignored the ‘revelations’ which concern his right and left hand men.

He goes on to explain how he was snubbed by the chief of staff with a letter delivered by a messenger ‘on the street’ just before his anticipated appearance before the Committee in Malta last February. That letter stirred no small amount of outrage within the Committee and the chairman was no exception, not least because the chief of staff had gone so far in his excuses as to have questioned the PANA Committee’s European parliamentary remit. He had explained that he did not want to create a nasty precedent of non-elected people being called to testify before European parliamentary committees.

The chair in his letter then went on to note that during the Committee’s one-day fact-finding mission to Malta last February, Malta’s finance minister himself had ‘committed on behalf of the Maltese [EU] Presidency to make progress’ in the area of fighting against tax evasion and money laundering. The insinuations in that sentence were glaring.

After being snubbed by the chief of staff last February in such an audacious way, the Committee chairman has now gone over the chief of staff’s head by going straight to his boss and asking him to order his employee to appear in Strasbourg on a set date and at a set time two months from now.

And in so doing he has put the ball squarely in the Prime Minister’s court. Following the Committee chairman’s request for him to exert his authority and ensure that the chief of staff shows up this time around, the Prime Minister has undoubtedly found himself in something of a pickle.

If he fails to force his chief of staff to go to Strasbourg, it would show that the Prime Minister either has no authority over him, or it would show that the Prime Minister is complicit in and condones his chief of staff’s continual refusal of the PANA Committee’s invitations.

It would seem that the only way for the Prime Minister to wriggle out of this fix he has found himself in after the Committee chairman so skil- fully upped the ante, would be to force his chief of staff to at last subject himself the scrutiny of the PANA Committee.

The chief of staff’s colleague at the Office of the Prime Minister, Minister Konrad Mizzi, had done so last February. But he unsuccessfully, by all reports, failed to pull the wool over the prying eyes of most Committee members with his woeful tales of how he had been the victim of ‘fake news’. He said the country’s independent media, those who had actual access to the Panama Papers, were in the metaphorical pockets of the Opposition party and they had unjustly victimised him for having simply and innocently wanted to set up an innocuous trust for his family.

But it seems that the chief of staff, although an accomplished person in his own right, does not have the gift of the gab or the brass neck that his ministerial level colleague has. And something tells us that he would be able to pull off such an act where the minister was widely deemed to have crashed and burned.

But should the Prime Minister fail to force his chief of staff to Strasbourg, it will, as said, show that the Prime Minister has no authority over his underling or that he backs the insulting attitude already shown to the Committee and, by default, to the European Parliament itself. A situation that is already embarrassing for the country as a whole will become even more so.

The question is: does anyone in government realise how bad this all looks, and, perhaps more pertinently, do they even care?